For a medium viewed as a platform through which all the world can unite and share ideas with each other, the Internet has a surprising tendency to keep us locked up in our own online gated communities. While the internet is often romanticized as a place that transcends ideological and social boundaries, things rarely actually play out that way. As much as we hate it admit it, people would generally much rather see confirmation that their beliefs and views are correct than evidence that they might be wrong.
For example, the video game message board I frequent is one in which the general consensus is that PC is the best gaming platform. We talk about how much better PC is than consoles like Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and everyone agrees with each other. I stick to that board because the views of the people on that board are consistent with my own. Sure, I COULD always go to a board where the posters generally hold that consoles are better than PC, but I'd rather not associate with insane people.
What I'm trying to say is that even though the internet gives us unprecedented access to a huge new world of desperate thoughts and ideas, we generally prefer to stick to out own little "cliques" on the internet, avoiding contact with other groups and ways of thinking even as they sit only a short distance away, occupying the same internet we do. The internet follows High School rules - two different social groups will stick together and never converge with each other, even if they're sitting right next to each other in the cafeteria.
You could always try to find some opposing views on the internet, but our benevolent corporate overlords have different plans. By tailoring search results to a privacy-violating assessment of the user, you can rest assured that Google will never allow you to see anything that conflicts with your pre-determined worldview. Companies don't want us to see things that challenge us or make us think too hard - they just want to keep us dumb, fat and happy. Yeah, that's the American way!
In the video game Metal Gear Solid 2, there were artificial intelligences that could invent "facts" by changing the information that reached people. By simply exposing people only to the information they wanted them to see and censoring out what they didn't, they could essentially alter reality. Is this sort of thing happening now in real life with the internet? Are our search engines conditioning us to believe in a phony, pre-packaged reality by selectively picking out the results they show us? Is Google controlling out very minds!?
Don't worry, I just did a Google search about it and it assured me that everything is fine.
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/mind-control-and-internet/
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/st_thompson_homophily
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Friday, October 4, 2013
Barack Obama's splendid social-media adventure
True to his campaign image of progress and change, Barack Obama went about his campaigning with the aid of something no former Presidential candidate had used to such effect: social media. In 2008, a large part of Obama's campaign involved reaching out to people via the internet, relying on social media to spread the word and bring in funding. Obama's social media website, www.my.barackobama.com, reached out to millions of his supporters, updating them instantly on what to do to aid the Obama campaign and contently bringing new people into the fold. Obama was also a constant presence on Twitter and Youtube, netting millions of followers and views.
Internet campaigning had been tried before, but never with the breadth and involvement of the Obama campaign. Obama's internet team understood the what the magic bullet of social media - they were the first political internet team to grasp what the essence of the power of social media was: the power of word-of-mouth. The critical attribute of social media is in its ability to facilitate "viral" phenomena, that is, the spread of something from one person to another, and then that person to several more people, again and again until the message has reached millions.
In this way, Obama had "footsoldiers", as the article called them, doing the work for him. Obama's internet followers would spread things like requests for funding automatically to others, who would continue to spread it to others still. You can say that the Obama campaign invented internet crowdfunding, which would later come into fruition on websites like Kickstarter. Obama could make up what he lacked in multi-million dollar donations from big-wigs and corporations with the tremendous amount of sub-200 dollar donations he got via the internet.
The success of Obama's internet exploits will undoubtedly have a tremendous effect on all future presidential campaigns. Social media is now recognized by politics are a powerful force in engaging and communicating with potential voters. As twitter and Facebook begin to consume our cultural consciousness, it only follows that politicians would need to adapt themselves to be where the action is to be successful. Adapt or die, presidential hopefuls.
http://cs12.cs.qc.cuny.edu/~waxman/8fn_002.pdf
Internet campaigning had been tried before, but never with the breadth and involvement of the Obama campaign. Obama's internet team understood the what the magic bullet of social media - they were the first political internet team to grasp what the essence of the power of social media was: the power of word-of-mouth. The critical attribute of social media is in its ability to facilitate "viral" phenomena, that is, the spread of something from one person to another, and then that person to several more people, again and again until the message has reached millions.
In this way, Obama had "footsoldiers", as the article called them, doing the work for him. Obama's internet followers would spread things like requests for funding automatically to others, who would continue to spread it to others still. You can say that the Obama campaign invented internet crowdfunding, which would later come into fruition on websites like Kickstarter. Obama could make up what he lacked in multi-million dollar donations from big-wigs and corporations with the tremendous amount of sub-200 dollar donations he got via the internet.
The success of Obama's internet exploits will undoubtedly have a tremendous effect on all future presidential campaigns. Social media is now recognized by politics are a powerful force in engaging and communicating with potential voters. As twitter and Facebook begin to consume our cultural consciousness, it only follows that politicians would need to adapt themselves to be where the action is to be successful. Adapt or die, presidential hopefuls.
http://cs12.cs.qc.cuny.edu/~waxman/8fn_002.pdf
Cyber bullying: The Mainstream Media's latest attempt to scare parents over a non-issue
You gotta love the mainstream media. It's amusing and almost even impressive how they can take anything new enough for their target audience of middle-aged housewives to be wary of it and blow it up into a seemingly catastrophic issue. Look, these guys need news to make a living, and it's an unfortunate fact that there just isn't enough news out there to fill their entire air time every day. So sometimes you have to improvise. And by "improvise", I mean "convince parents that there is something out there that will follow your children to their house and murder them in their sleep".
The latest threat to the safety of children everywhere is social media. Facebook, online chatting, Youtube, things of that nature. The talking heads on TV will go on at length about how being called a name on the internet, or "cyber bullying" as they call it, will somehow result in death 101% of the time. Now, I can't imagine any motivation TV news networks would have for smearing the media that is replacing them and making them irrelevant, so they must be on to something.
A PBS documentary explaining to parents that their kids are doing something as new-fangled as it is lethal goes into depth about the story of a boy who killed himself due to "cyber bullying". While watching this, I couldn't figure out why the kid didn't just turn off him computer or just stop using AOL chat. I'm no psychiatrist, but I think it's safe to say this kid had issues beyond having an internet connection when his first thought upon seeing unpleasant things on the internet is to kill himself instead of, you know, getting off the internet. The power button to the computer is RIGHT THERE. Pressing that button has got to be easier than hanging yourself.
Next, CBS brings us the tragic tale of a woman who was called a "whore" on Youtube. The deeply-concerned sounding interviewers ask her lots of questions, but surprisingly "why didn't you just avoid the offensive videos?" is not one of them. But she certainly isn't just in this for an easy buck or anything - the woman says in the first interview that she has no intention to sue Google. By the next interview, she has already sued Google. It seems to me that the real news story here is "You can make a fortune suing billion-dollar companies over nothing, and get full media support for your underhanded greed!" Man, if I got a dollar for every time I was called a name on the internet I could probably BUY Google by now. Amazingly, I have yet to commit suicide.
I'm reminded of a show I saw in which two girls are talking about a social media site. "Don't you get nervous, with all those people talking about you?” one girl asks the other. "They aren't people I actually know", she replies. "And if I ever get fed up with them, I can just do this-", and she turns off her smartphone. She might have been on to something.
Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yha7oa21YM&feature=relmfu
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6797340n
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/view/
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